Sam Hardwick's web journal

I learnt on Wikipedia that the intro to Whipping Post is in 11/4 time. 11/4, what the hell? Eventually I figured out how that goes, and also noticed that Finnish is no good for counts that go above 10. Till then most numbers have natural one-syllable abbreviations, but 11 doesn’t. Its unabbreviated form has 4 syllables, one more than in English. Hmm. Long story short, I made a graph of the syllable counts of the counting numbers up to 100 in 9 languages (thanks to Zet@#aspekti for many of them):

(click to see large version)

Some observations:

French is most compact, except in the 80-100 range where English (which is quite consistent overall) is best

Yeah, that’s right, and 70 = 60+10 and 90 = 4*20+10. The base 10 thing was just the observation that the graph has obvious dips at each multiple for 10 of every language. There are similar irregularities in other languages as well.